Heidi Lender

I recently had the great pleasure of jurying Self-Searching: The Art of Self-Portraiture, an exhibition for the Vermont Photo Place Gallery. One of the images I selected was from Heidi Lender, and that photograph sent me to her site. I discovered that the image above was just one of many from her series, Once Upon.

Heidi has led an international life as a fashion writer and photo stylist in New York, LA, London, and Paris, and then changed directions and lived in India part-time for six years studying yoga. In 2008, she picked up her first digital SLR and retired her pen forever in favor of pictures. She currently splits her time between Northern California and Garzon, Uruguay. I am also featuring some of her expressive portraits from India.

One never knows what will spark an idea for a photograph or a project, and Heidi explains the genesis her her whimsical, yet insightful series of self portraits.

In April 2009, I joined a flickr group called “Bench Monday,” whose rules were: “Stand on a bench. Make sure it’s Monday. Wear something pretty.” It started innocently, a game of discovery – a bench, a dress, a setting – and as a laboratory for post-processing experiments. The weekly self-imposed assignment, however, transformed into ONCE UPON, a photo-tale exploring the ego and individual in various environments and apparel.



With a platform on which to stand, I whimsically investigate the host of personalities within, the layers and textures that make up the self, the characters we hide, show, accept and reject, and the role that fashion and design play in molding those characters. Headless (or faceless) self-portraits lend a sense of objectivity, obscurity and freedom from identification.















Images from India

Klea McKenna

San Francisco photographer, Klea McKenna, creates work that is rooted in the natural world: the effects, the celebration, and the examination of that world. Her investigations result in new ways of looking at photography, and at nature. She recently had an exhibition at the Rayko Photo Center of her project, Slow Burn, and was selected to receive the 3rd Hey, Hot Shot! Curator's Choice Award for the same work by Lesley A. Martin, publisher of Aperture's books program. Nymphoto also has an interesting conversation with Klea here.

After growing up in northern California and Hawaii, Klea studied photography at UCLA, UCSC, Florence Art Institute and recently received an MFA from the California College of the Arts where she is currently an instructor.

My relationship to the natural landscape lies somewhere between adoration and suspicion. This ambivalence has fueled each of my recent projects. I am interested in human perceptions of and representations of nature, and photography's ability to both confirm and disarm those perceptions. Slow Burn is an ongoing series of experiments. With each one, I learn something new which leads me to the next experiment.



As we rush ahead to embrace new digital technologies we are leaving the imaging potential of traditional light sensitive materials relatively untapped. Confined, as they have largely been, to representational reproduction. With this is mind I push these materials to record perceptual experience rather than accurate image. Using analogue photographic methods and crude, handmade cameras, I explore the materiality of the photographic medium and it's capacity to interact with and represent place and landscape in new ways.



Recent experiments have included filling the camera with live insect and plant specimens while photographing as well as folding the film up so that it reacts to light as a 3-dimensional object. I attempt to rupture our perception by making the flawed material of the film itself as visible as the image it has captured. There is also a sense of gradual loss in this work, the loss of natural places, of time and of the analogue photographic materials that make these experiments possible. My methodology is informed by the strategies of field biology, Victorian naturalism, and homespun science; practices that employ intense and prolonged observation of natural phenomena.















Images from Give Me A Sign

Alan W George

I am not quite sure how but somewhere along the way, photography has become a central part of my life. Photography for me is a way of exploring the world. It's the process of searching, selecting and examining something that would otherwise go unnoticed. Through this process, I feel more conscious, more aware, more engaged, more alive. Plus, as Mr. Winogrand put so succinctly , I just like to see what things look like as photographs.

I can really relate to what Alan George has to say about photography, and it's evident in his work. Alan has a number of interesting series--three are featured below--that are observations of the world around him. He has a way a finding order in chaos, finding humor in the mundane, and most importantly, realizing that life is fascinating and worth celebrating.

Alan was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina and then moved to Nashville, Tennessee. In 1996 I moved with my wife, Jennifer, from Nashville to San Francisco, California looking for a change, something different. We found it. After 10 plus years of culture shock, it's starting to feel like home. We now live in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco with our two kids, dog, cat and a 30 year mortgage.

Images from Immediate Vicinity
On 21st of March, 2007 my daughter was born. My son had, two months prior, celebrated his second birthday. Anyone in similar circumstances can appreciate that there is little time for anything other than domesticated "bliss" and occasionally some sleep. Photography seemed out of the question. Determined to pick up the camera again, I set about to make the best use of the only time that I had at my disposal, my commute to work which consisted of a 12 minute walk to the subway and then a 10 minute ride.

Photography, at least it seems to me, has a direct relationship with the "reality" the photographer experiences, either accidental or contrived. The photographer selects some portion of this "reality", captures it and presents it as a photograph. The job of a photographer is to manage this "reality" is such a way as to result in interesting photographs. Traveling to exotic destinations, achieving access to the otherwise inaccessible locations/people, constructing film set like concoctions; these are but a few of the many "reality" enhancement techniques. None of which where readily available to me. This series of images is a result of an attempt to make the most of my forced "reality".











Images from domesticated
With this series of images, I examine domesticated urban plants and people's attempts to control and manipulate them in sometimes trivial and inconsequential ways. My hope is that these at times humorous and tragic examples echo conditions within the larger context of the relationship between humanity and nature. I also hope that the viewer can identify with certain human or anthropomorphic characteristics of the subjects, perhaps feeling a bit saddened by their subjugated circumstances.















Images from sweet nothing
It occurs one day. The realization that there is just about as much road ahead as there is behind. That you have made decisions that have put you on this seemingly unalterable course and the conclusion appears disturbingly clear.